West Virginia: a Mine-Field Melodrama.

The article presents information on West Virginia. In West Virginia it is the staff of life. The State is a huge layer cake, hacked into grotesque slices by the elements, the slices are the mountains, the layers are rock, and the filling is coal. Rough mountains rise all about, beautiful in their bleak ugliness. It is coal on which a third of the population depends directly for its living, it is coal on which probably another third depends indirectly. It is coal that has converted the State into one great pockmark of mines. Before that, the State was a sort of wilderness, carved out of the backwoods of Virginia in the turmoil of the Civil War. Indigenous to it was a unique type of human being, the mountaineer.